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Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

Golang is great because it was the first to include excellent tooling in addition to the language (strict compiler, linting, non-customizable gofmt, package manager, good html docs, online playground, etc.)

It’s undeniable that it brought a lot of good ideas that languages like Rust borrowed.

Golang is still undefeated in terms of battery included. Its standard library is top notch and full featured.

On the other hand it is more high-level, has a GC, and has made a number of mistakes (no sum types). The biggest trade off it does though: it lacks expressiveness. The new generic will probably help, but the trade off of Golang is deep. It makes writing code harder so that reading is easier.

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Common Lisp, Smalltalk, Delphi, C++ Builder, Java, .NET languages...

Plenty of examples preceded Go in what good tooling means.

I’ve used all of those except Delphi. I think Go got a lot right and is in a different (better) ballpark, tooling wise.

Only from the pre-historic UNIX CLI point of view.

I don't believe Go was the first language to include "excellent tooling." Ruby on Rails, for instance, has had excellent tooling since the dawn of time, and I'd argue that Ruby on Rails' and Elixir's tooling are superior to Go's.

Elixir is a FL so it is in a category of its own. I’ve done some Ruby and I don’t remember the tooling as being exceptional like Golang’s

what elixir tooling are you using? I absolutely deplore writing elixir because I just find the tooling atrocious

Java and Erlang both have phenomenal tooling, especially when it comes to runtime introspection and debugging.

I'd say Java and the JVM is the most overcomplete language and ecosystem out there when it comes to available tooling.

I've had nothing but negative experiences debugging elixir honestly. In a large project, trying to step debug is just way too slow

this is a bit part of it for me. Most of the tools you need for average development, triage, perf analysis, etc... are included out of the box.

What is meant with expressiveness in this context?

Generics, sum types, macros, functional programming stuff, basically things that allow you to do more things

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